Apple stalker app pulled

After howls of complaint, a developer has finally pulled an app which allowed Apple fanboys to stalk women.

The “Girls Around Me” app used location-based social networking service Foursquare to show where women had checked in nearby.

The app was pulled, not because any rapist used it to hunt someone down, but because the app’s developer didn’t think it worked properly.

But Laura Covington, a Foursquare spokeswoman, told the New York Times that the app was a violation of the social not-working site’s API policy so the developer was told to pull it.

The app showed on a map women who had checked-in to locations nearby using Foursquare. It let users know Facebook information about these ladies if they had tied their Facebook account to their Foursquare account.

Gizmodo dubbed the app the “world’s creepiest”. However, the Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee thought that it was completely innocent.

It is just as likely to be reacted to with laughter as it is with tears, he wrote, before admitting that it had the potential to be used as a tool for rapists and stalkers.

The company behind the app, O.O.O. SMS Services, said it was designed to make “geo-social exploration of popular venues easy and visual”.

The company added it was “impossible” to search for a particular person in the app or to track their movements.

Still, it is not the first app to do something like this and we don’t think it will be the last.